Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The Burlington & Missouri River R.R. Co. offered land in Iowa and Nebraska at six percent interest and low prices, with ten years’ credit. The railroad offered free boarding house rooms to interested buyers while they made their decisions. Railroad companies performed an important role as promoters of settlement and agricultural development in the West.

Calling southwest Kansas ideal for farming and ranching, the Atchison, Topeka &

Santa Fe Railway Company offered woodland and prairie land with promises of “pure and abundant water,” and good soil for crops. A reference in the German language at the bottom of the circular shows the company’s intent to appeal to immigrants from Europe.
Panel 8

Machines and Markets over Nature
The theory of rain following the plow represented a general belief throughout the Plains during these years: Americans seemed sure of their superiority over nature. As migrants moved to the Plains in the decades on either side of 1900, companies sold them machines to alter the landscape of deep-rooted grass. Advertisements showed gleaming tractors and mechanical harvesters in fields of golden wheat.
The hope for profits and prosperity expressed in advertisements for farm machinery echoed the views of farmers themselves. Machines made plowing the fields easier, made the harvest easier, and seemingly brought rain. Rainfall did briefly increase, but not because of agriculture. Railroads carried the resulting crop to distant markets where buyers paid a high price for the wheat.
Farmers of the Plains during the twenty years after 1900 generally made a good living despite periodic droughts in some regions. People saw hope ahead, an optimism encouraged by the steady amount of rain that fell between 1900 and 1920 in many places. In 1915, Oklahoma writer and farmer Caroline Henderson noted: “It has been a full year for us, with more of encouragement for the future.” Henderson’s letters contained much more depth and feeling than the advertisements selling machines, but she expressed a similar confidence about human ability to improve the land.
Wallis tractor advertising booklet, 1928

Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-97284

In order to turn over the prairie landscape of deep-rooted grass and replace it with soil that was easier to plant, farmers needed tractors. Many farming implement companies offered the latest in machinery that promised to make the farms profitable and prosperous.

Four tractors from the Trued Brothers Tractor Company break land at the Simon Fishman farm in Greeley County, Kansas, northeast of the town of Tribune. Changing the land by plowing brought about the rapid disappearance of Plains grasslands.

This advertisement reinforces the message that machines make plowing and harvesting easier and help bring profit and prosperity, as well as rain. Rainfall in much of the Plains region from 1900–1920 was adequate, and farmers expected it to remain so.

A man using a four-horse team creates a contour of furrows in turning over short-grass prairie so that the field can be planted. The elimination of deep-rooted prairie grasses in favor of shallow-rooted crops was partly responsible for the widespread destruction caused by the high winds and drought of the Dust Bowl period.

Wheat prices steadily increased early in the twentieth century and farmers’ profits rose accordingly. After 1900, many farmers grew only wheat, which has shallow roots compared to native grasses.

A sod-busting Reeves steam tractor turns over the soil in this striking image by F.M. Steele, a photographer who took thousands of photographs of cowboys and the prairie, and at one time had studios in over a dozen towns in Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. This powerful steam tractor could turn a dozen furrows at one time.

This unique panoramic photograph from the turn of the century shows people working with a gasoline-powered plow and road machine to reclaim prairie land for crop farming.

In western Kansas, corn and grain sorghums, as well as wheat, were common crops on farms. During the first 20 years of the twentieth century, abundant rainfall and record-breaking crop yields seemed to prove that turning over the prairie for crops would lead to profits and prosperity. The flourishing corn in this photograph is on the John William Wampler farm in Finney County, Kansas.

A flourishing cabbage patch on a small farm in southwestern Kansas shows that there was enough rain in this area during the first decades of the twentieth century to successfully grow many different kinds of crops. Adding interest to the background of this photograph are farm buildings, a windmill, a corral, and a person seated in a horse-drawn carriage.

A large wagon load of sacks of wheat sits alongside railroad tracks which will take the wheat to market. Although this scene is west of the actual Dust Bowl drought area in

Colorado, it is typical of the record-breaking wheat yields that were produced and sent to market in the Plains during the 1910s and 1920s, resulting in satisfying profits for farmers.
“This year for variety an unprecedented amount of rain and snow… the unusual moisture lures us on to hope for a wheat crop in 1929.” — Caroline Henderson, December 19, 1928

Panel 11

No More Rain
“The rain for which we were hoping so eagerly when I wrote last has never come. Indeed, we have had no effective moisture since early June.” —Caroline Henderson, September 17, 1932
The prosperity did not last. The temporary environmental and economic conditions that encouraged the boom on the Plains ended in the early 1930s. An epic drought started in 1931, with a center in the Oklahoma panhandle. For much of the 1930s, significant portions of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, North and South Dakota, and New Mexico experienced severe drought. Climatologists now deem the drought one of the worst in the region in the last five hundred years.
Although wind erosion occurred on unplowed land, the expansion of agriculture in the Plains since the 1880s intensified the effects of the drought on farms. Agriculture fared much worse than in previous periods of diminished rainfall. Large expanses of the earth lay bare. No longer protected by the grass and its deep roots, the soil dried and turned to a fine dust that the winds spread everywhere.
The lack of rain destroyed the sense of control over nature that Plains farmers had enjoyed during the boom years. The rain did not follow the plow, and new farming machines did little to save crops that could not grow without water. Caroline Henderson wrote that their farm had “no rain for weeks.”
A farmer shows how high his wheat should be, 1936

Arthur Rothstein, photographer

Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

John Frederick, a farmer in Grant County, North Dakota, on the northern edge of the Dust Bowl drought area, shows with his outstretched arm that his wheat would be a good three feet taller if there were sufficient rain. An epic drought began in 1931 and continued for much of the 1930s in portions of North Dakota and other Plains states.

Because of the widespread planting of shallow-rooted crops like wheat, soil was no longer anchored by the extensive root system of prairie grasses. Wind was a constant feature of Plains weather, and tons of topsoil blew across the Plains and buried farm buildings like this one in Liberal, Kansas, during the 1930s drought.

In a typical scene from the Dust Bowl period in Oklahoma, a lone figure looks out over a forlorn, wind-eroded landscape. Drifts of soil have nearly buried the fence, and no crops or vegetation are visible for miles.

Nebraska was one of the Plains states which experienced severe drought for much of the 1930s. With no water to drink and little vegetation to graze on, this longhorn in Sioux

County, Nebraska, died along with hundreds of thousands of other cattle in ranching and farming areas.
Panel 12

Black Sunday
The winds and the dry fields produced epic dust storms. Perhaps the largest one occurred on April 14, 1935, a day known as Black Sunday, when the sunlight grew dim and the sun was blocked by a great dust-filled maelstrom. Although the Plains had always endured dust storms, the storms increased in frequency between 1932 and 1936 before diminishing in 1938. Some areas endured fifty major dust storms annually during the Dust Bowl years.
Caroline Henderson described a dust storm in “Dust to Eat,” a report to the United States Secretary of Agriculture. “There are days when for hours at a time we cannot see the windmill fifty feet from the kitchen door. There are days when for briefer periods one cannot distinguish the windows from the solid wall because of the solid blackness of the raging storm.”
Marg Scruggs described “Black Sunday” in an oral history interview: “At about 4 p.m., we looked outside and the whole northwest sky and north sky was just black as midnight... it was just black, the blackest I’ve ever seen.” Marvin Carnagey later wrote a poem about that day: “I thought it was the end of the world, and we were all going to Hell. A black cloud rolled up in the northern sky.” The following Sunday, church attendance on the Plains reached all-time highs.
Car with dust storm approaching, March, 1936

Arthur Rothstein, photographer

Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

In this ominous scene, a car appears to be followed by heavy black clouds of dust as it drives down a desolate road in the Texas Panhandle. Although the height of the Dust Bowl drought was in 1936, dust storms were common from 1932 through 1938. Some storms reached far beyond the drought area. In May 1934, dust blizzards propelled by forty and fifty mile-per-hour winds caked cities as far away as New York and Washington, D.C. In Chicago, millions of pounds of dust were deposited on the city, cutting off sunlight and causing widespread respiratory problems. Even ships 300 miles off the Atlantic coast were covered with dust.

During the Dust Bowl years, some areas endured up to 50 dust storms per year. People reported that chickens would roost at midday, and that birds fell from the sky, suffocating in the thick dust. People and animals suffered and sometimes died from “dust pneumonia” after inhaling too much dust into their lungs.

The highlighted region illustrates a typical spatial definition of the Dust Bowl. These boundaries are based on wind erosion maps produced by the Soil Conservation Service for the period 1935-1940. The boundary of the Dust Bowl region, however, was inconstant. The location and distribution of dust storms, wind erosion, the most severe drought, farm failures, and human migration varied from year to year.

SCAN THIS QR CODE http://www.library.okstate.edu/oralhistory/prewitt.mp3

During the 1930s, residents of towns across the Plains endured dust deluges that prevented them from carrying out daily activities. People stayed inside during the worst of the storms, and businesses would shut down and schools close. At night, street lights were often invisible. Stories were told of city people becoming so disoriented that they could be across the street from their homes or businesses and have no idea of where they were.

In a photograph probably taken in Oklahoma, a man and his car are stranded in a dust storm. During dust storms, so much static electricity built up between the ground and airborne dust that it could short out car engines and radios. People would have to abandon their cars and walk. To avoid stalling, motorists often grounded their cars by dragging chains from the back fenders.

—Marvin Carnagey

Farm implements and machinery lie buried in dust on this farm in Dallas, a small town in central South Dakota not far from the state line with Nebraska. Dust Bowl effects were felt in parts of South Dakota and a number of other Plains states.

Residents of the town of Liberal, in Seward County, southwestern Kansas, stand in front of the local Red Cross building wearing masks to protect their lungs from blowing dust and to prevent “dust pneumonia.” Some children in the hardest hit Dust Bowl areas wore dust masks to and from school.

A farmer and a young boy try to raise a fence that has been swamped by dust to prevent it from being completely buried. Their farm is in Cimarron County, in the far western Oklahoma Panhandle near the Colorado and New Mexico borders.

Headlines tell the story of the havoc created by dust: “Three year old Benson boy survives almost 20 hours in raging dust storm,” “Farmers fight to stop losses by dust storms,” “Two planes make forced landings as black blizzard hides airport.” Experts estimated that 850 million tons of topsoil blew off the Plains in just one year—1935.

A bleak, dry, and dust blown landscape surrounds a farmhouse in the Coldwater area north of Dalhart, a town in northwest Texas near the Oklahoma border. People were still living in this house at the time, but most of the houses in the district had been abandoned. The Dalhart area experienced many “black blizzards,” terrifying and violent storms in which dirt was carried as high as 8,000 feet, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning.

The extreme conditions of the Dust Bowl challenged farm families to find new strategies to survive. In addition to enduring the overwhelming dust, residents of the region witnessed the death of their farm animals. Caroline Henderson wrote to a friend of spending “the better part of a night during the week trying to save two of the best young cows” from the effects of the dust.

until her death in 2012. The Carnageys grew up on separate farms and met after the Dust Bowl. Although Marvin died in 2013, Laverta still lives in the region today.

A family living near Pierre, North Dakota, shares a meal together. A five-year battle with drought, dust, and grasshoppers exhausted all of their resources. But they stayed on their farm.

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This woman had come to the Oklahoma Panhandle to farm long before the Dust Bowl years, and stayed with her family throughout the environmental and economic crisis of the 1930s. Millions of people like her proudly endured, vowing not to leave their homes, and made the best of their situation until the hard times were over.

A man digs an irrigation ditch in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. The drought of the 1930s impressed on farmers that water was absolutely essential to their crops and livestock, and that they could not count on nature to reliably supply it.